Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Uncle Sam Wants His Money


Dennis Farina plays Uncle Sam in Get Shorty.

Let this story be a lesson to everybody, be careful when you’re taking out a loan with the country’s biggest gang:

It might seem odd in an era defined by stagnant wages and rising income inequality for the long arm of the law to be cuffing Americans who default on their federal student loans. But according to reports out of Texas, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Paul Aker, 48, tells the New York Daily News and a local Fox broadcast affiliate that a coterie of heavily armed US Marshals showed up at his door in Houston last Thursday. His alleged crime? Failing to pay Uncle Sam back for a $1,500 student loan he took out to attend Prairie View A&M in 1987, he claims.

If you fail to pay back the mafia there’s a good chance armed men will come to your door, kidnap you, and take you to the Don.

This is another example of the rules being different from private individuals and the State. If you or a private institution loans money to somebody and they refuse to pay you cannot kidnap them and place them in a cage until they pay you back. Uncle Sam can. So think twice before taking any of his filthy lucre.

You Can’t Stop The Signal

What would happen if the United States government passed a bill mandating the inclusion of backdoors in cryptographic algorithms? Not much. The politicians in Washington DC, like many denizens of this nation, forget that there is an entire world outside of this nation’s borders. A recent report put together by actual security experts shows that any domestic laws hindering encryption will be futile because a lot of cryptography software comes from abroad:

An estimated 63 percent of the encryption products available today are developed outside US borders, according to a new report that takes a firm stance against the kinds of mandated backdoors some federal officials have contended are crucial to ensuring national security.

The report, prepared by security researchers Bruce Schneier, Kathleen Seidel, and Saranya Vijayakumar, identified 865 hardware or software products from 55 countries that incorporate encryption. Of them, 546 originated from outside the US. The most common non-US country was Germany, a country that has publicly disavowed the kinds of backdoors advocated by FBI Director James Comey and other US officials. Although the Obama administration is no longer asking Congress for legislation requiring them, it continues to lobby private industry to include ways law enforcement agencies can decrypt encrypted data sent or stored by criminal or terrorism suspects.

We’re told that mandatory backdoors are necessary to make the lives of law enforcers easier. But passing a law mandating backdoors in systems that utilize cryptography would only effect domestic companies. Most devices are manufactured outside of the United States. Any law mandating ineffective cryptography would only applies to domestic devices, which means the mandated backdoors would likely only be included in devices meant for sale in the United States. That means avoiding a purposely weakened device would be as simple as ordering it from a foreign reseller.

Most of the boogeymen the politicians point to to justify mandating backdoors are primarily based in foreign countries. The terrorist and sex trafficking organizations are already buying their communication equipment outside of the United States so they will be entirely unaffected by any new domestic laws. Furthermore, being criminal organizations, nothing will change for them since they’re already breaking numerous laws.

At most a mandatory backdoor law will put the denizens here, at least those dumb enough to continue buying domestic devices, at risk of being exploited by domestic and foreign governments as well as malware producers.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Do you know why we can’t have nice things? It’s because there are quisling out there ready and willing to cooperate with their oppressors:

MINNEAPOLIS – A Maple Grove bar owner and manager have been charged after being caught illegally importing Spotted Cow beer that they then sold at their establishment.

The two men, Brandon Hlavka, 37, of St. Michael and David Lantos, 28, of Brooklyn Park, were charged with a single felony of transporting alcohol into Minnesota for resale on Feb. 4.

Lantos, the bar manager, and Hlavka, the owner, of Maple Tavern were busted in April of last year after someone reported they were selling the Wisconsin beer on tap.

The New Glarus Brewing Co. beer is not a licensed manufacturer in Minnesota and its beer cannot be sold in the state.

Alcohol laws here in Minnesota are, well, really fucking stupid. There are different rules for alcohol that is sold only for on site consumption, referred to as on sale liquor, and alcohol sold only for off site consumption, referred to as off sale liquor. You can only buy on sale liquor at bars and restaurants and off sale liquor at liquor stores. Grocery stores can only sell liquor if they have a store separate from the grocery section. And the list goes on and on.

In this case the bar owners were importing beer from a company that isn’t licensed here in Minnesota. Here in Minnesota that’s a felony. You read that right, selling beer from an unlicensed manufacturer is a fucking felony.

These laws wouldn’t be as big of a deal if it wasn’t for quisling like the one who turned these bar owners over. If nobody cooperated with the laws the laws would be much harder to enforce. Unfortunately there are people who are willing to ruin the lives of others because their religion of statism mandates that individual humans are of less value than the arbitrary decrees issued by the political clergy. It’s fucking sick.

Freely Accessing Scientific Publications Behind A Paywall

On the one hand we’re told that pure science can only be performed under the “neutrality” of government funding while on the other hand we’re told the research we were forced to fund isn’t ours to access. Having to pay to access research papers that I was forced to fund has been a pet peeve of mine since college. Even though I enjoyed free access to most scientific papers in college the simple fact that I would lose that access as soon as I graduated really rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately I’m not alone. A group of people have developed a service aimed at pirating scientific research papers:

Sci-Hub uses university networks to access subscription-only academic papers, generally without the knowledge of the academic institutions. When a user asks Sci-Hub to access a paid article, the service will download it from a university that subscribes to the database that owns it. As it delivers the user a pdf of the requested article, it also saves a copy on its own server, so that next time someone requests the paper, they can download the cached version.

Unsurprisingly, Elbakyan’s project has drawn the ire of publishers. Last year, Elsevier sued Sci-Hub and an associated website called Library Genesis for violating its copyright. The two websites “operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database,” Elsevier’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, referring to the company’s subscription database.

[…]

But even if the new domain gets shut down, too, Sci-Hub will still be accessible on the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Like its seedy dark-web neighbors, the Sci-Hub site is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity.

Sci-Hub can be accessed via the normal Internet here and via Tor here. That second link is important to have since Sci-Hub was already shutdown once. While it’s feasible for the State to censor the normal Internet it’s not feasible for it to censor Tor hidden services since there is no centralized name server to threaten.

I don’t hide my opposition to intellectual property in all forms but I especially detest copyright applying to criminally funded research. A thief should make reparations to right the wrong they have caused so the only way to right the wrong of the State stealing money to fund favored researchers it to make the findings of their research freely available to everybody.

Using Technology To Avoid The Morality Police

As with every other government on the planet, Iran has a body of law enforcers whose primary job is to exploit wealth from the general populace. Just as in the United States, many of the law in Iran are based around morality. For example, if your manner of dress is deemed inappropriate the law enforcers have an excuse to expropriate wealth from you. The natural tendency of an exploited people is to find a way to avoid as much exploitation as possible. To that end a group of Iranian developers have created an app to help their fellows avoid the morality police:

Ershad’s mobile checkpoints which usually consist of a van, a few bearded men and one or two women in black chadors, are deployed in towns across Iran and appear with no notice.

Ershad personnel have a very extensive list of powers ranging from issuing warnings and forcing those they accuse of violating Iran’s Islamic code of conduct, to make a written statement pledging to never do so again, to fines or even prosecuting offenders.

The new phone app which is called “Gershad” (probably meaning get around Ershad instead of facing them) however, will alert users to checkpoints and help them to avoid them by choosing a different route.

The data for the app is crowdsourced. It relies on users to point out the location of the Ershad vans on maps and when a sufficient number of users point out the same point, an alert will show up on the map for other users. When the number decreases, the alert will fade gradually from the map.

Gershad sounds a lot like Waze, which is a traffic app that lets you report, amongst other things, police. Both are amongst the family of applications that allow the people to fight back against the State. Through crowdsourcing the much larger population of exploited individuals can enjoy a major information advantage over the State. As they used to say at the end of each episode of G.I. Joe, knowing is half the batter.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing the State, because of its sheer power, is an undefeatable foe. In reality the State is greatly disadvantages by the fact it is massively outnumbered. Being a bureaucracy it is also much slower to adapt to changes than the general population. Those two facts combined means the State will always lose in the long run. By the time the Ershad adapt to this application a countermeasure to its adaptions will almost certainly already be in place.

Rules Are Different For The King’s Men

When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) breaks into 1,300 computers with a single, vaguely written warrant it’s labeled justice. But when somebody breaks into the FBI’s computers it’s labeled criminal:

A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.

The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.

This is something that fascinates me about statism. It’s relies on the belief that humans are inherently bad and that the only solution is to absolve a handful of those humans of any responsibilities for their actions so they can control the rest.

A lot of people are willing to give the FBI a pass in breaking into 1,300 computers because the operation was dealing with combating child pornography. While I detest child pornography I also detest throwing due process out the window whenever it becomes inconvenient. There’s no way the FBI could know that all 1,300 computers it broke into were involved in the child pornography site. Not every visitor to a site is a user. Sometimes people are tricked into visiting a site, sometimes they’re curious if a site is actually as terrible as people are claiming (and often report sites containing illegal content to law enforcers if they find those claims to be true), etc. Due process involves identifying suspects based on evidence and investigating them specifically.

Further compounding the issue is the fact the FBI was knowingly distributing child pornography from its own servers. The agency was quite literally doing the exact same thing it was supposedly trying to stop.

Yet many people are calling what the FBI did justice while labeling what the hacker did as criminal.

Fascist France

France appears to have learned all the wrong lessons from World War II. Instead of recognizing fascism as a bad idea France seems to be adopting the idea that their conquerer must have had the right idea. No longer satisfied with merely having emergency powers as law the parliament of France has decided to make emergency powers part of the nation’s constitution:

Paris (AFP) – The lower house of the French parliament voted Monday in favour of enshrining in the constitution the process of declaring a state of national emergency, one of a series of controversial amendments the government proposed after November’s Paris attacks.

The measure — which gives the state increased security powers — was voted through by 103 to 26, although it met opposition from some leftwing lawmakers and some deputies from the right.

Truthfully this doesn’t change anything. Since emergency powers have already been declared and were being used it’s obvious the nation’s constitution did nothing to stop them. What this vote amounts to is the statist equivalent of a religious ritual. Within the religion of statism ritual is what determines whether a governmental decree is holy or heresy.

What What, In The Butt? Government.

What is the biggest concern facing Michigan? Some may say it’s the poisoned water in Flint. Others may say it’s the devastated economy in Detroit. The Michigan Senate has decided it’s butt sex:

Those who violate bans on anal sex in the US state of Michigan now face up to 15 years prison time, after the Michigan Senate passed a controversial bill last Thursday (February 4), and despite the US Supreme Court ruling the legislation to be unconstitutional.

I’m of the opinion that where one man sticks his dick is none of my concern so long as everybody involved has consented. That’s why the puritans’ fascination with male genitalia baffles me. But this doesn’t surprise me. Since humanity first developed the really bad idea of letting a handful of us rule everybody else the State has been very interested in what people do in their bedrooms. And bathrooms. And living rooms.

Basically the State is very interested in everything that happens in your home. That way it can tax, fine, or otherwise extort wealth from people. Do you want to remodel your a room? You need to buy a permit! Do you want to enjoy anal sex with your partner(s)? That’s a finable and jailable offense! Do you want to grow a plant that you use for medicinal properties? Excellent! Not only is that a finable and jailable offense but civil forfeiture can come into play as well!

The reason there are so many laws on the books is because the State wants a cut from every activity humanly possible. This is just another example of the State trying to get a piece of some action.

Detecting Wrongthink Early

1984 taking place in London was very appropriate. The United Kingdom (UK) has become the granddaddy of the surveillance state. Surveilling an entire nation isn’t easy, which is why the UK, like every other surveillance state, is desperately searching for new way to automate its activities. I’m sure that desperation is what lead to this idiocy:

London, United Kingdom – Schoolchildren in the UK who search for words such as “caliphate” and the names of Muslim political activists on classroom computers risk being flagged as potential supporters of terrorism by monitoring software being marketed to teachers to help them spot students at risk of radicalisation.

The “radicalisation keywords” library has been developed by the software company Impero as an add-on to its existing Education Pro digital classroom management tool to help schools comply with new duties requiring them to monitor children for “extremism”, as part of the government’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy.

[…]

The keywords list, which was developed in collaboration with the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism organisation that is closely aligned with the government, consists of more than 1,000 trigger terms including “apostate”, “jihadi” and “Islamism”, and accompanying definitions.

I’m not sure if schools in the UK have deteriorated as far as the schools here but if they haven’t then it’s quite plausible that many of the keywords being looked for would appear quite frequently in a history class. What’s more interesting is that they keywords don’t seem to so much be targeting terrorism as Islam.

It must be noted that using keywords to detect wrongthink is a fruitless endeavor. Because terrorism is currently the biggest target of the State’s propaganda it is a topic of general interest. A lot of people searching for keywords related to terrorism aren’t interested in becoming terrorists but merely want to learn about events related to terrorism. The number of false positives such a system will throw out are going to be far greater than any potentially useful information. Drowning out the signal in noise is counterproductive but it seems to be the strategy most automated surveillance systems rely on.

Sovereign Immunity Means Never Having To Take Responsibility For Your Actions

If a private company poisoned your water supply you’d have grounds for a lawsuit. The reason for this is obvious, poisoning your water causes damage to both your person and property. Because of this the only way to make things as right as possible is for the poisoner to pay reparations. But the rules are different when the State poisons your water supply because it enjoys a legal fiction called sovereign immunity:

Michigan’s state and local officials poisoned Flint’s water with lead but innocent federal taxpayers are the ones having to foot the cleanup bill. President Obama has pledged to hand Flint $85 million in aid money. This sounds like a lot, but the fact of the matter is that it is far less than what Flint’s victims would have gotten if a corporation — rather than government — had been the culprit. That’s because, unlike private companies, the government is shielded from liability lawsuits.

[…]

The main reason that they don’t have a prayer of collecting much more is something called the doctrine of sovereign immunity. Under this doctrine, citizens are barred from suing their government for screw-ups that it has caused in the course of discharging a core function unless the government itself consents. Some very narrow exceptions exist but it is very difficult to make them stick.

We’re often told that governing bodies within the United States contain a series of checks and balances. The federal government has legislative, executive, and judicial branches that are supposed to keep each other in check. Municipal governments are supposed to be kept in check by country governments which are supposed to be kept in check by state governments which are supposed to be kept in check by the federal government. Reality is much different though.

Instead of acting as a checks and balances the various pieces of the government more accurately reflect a circlejerk. Each part works to absolve the other of responsibility.

People have sued parts of the government before but only after it consented to being sued. Herein lies the major difference between private entities and the State. When a private entity causes you damage you can sue them whether they agree to allow you to do so or not. Suing the State requires getting its permission to do so. Since the State enjoys a monopoly on legal services within its borders you have no recourse if the State tells you to go pound sand when you come asking for permission to sue it.